Outtake from my column today
Today in the Dallas Morning News is the story I wrote about going to SXSW just after my father’s death.
It’s a looooong story, but it was longer earlier. This is a section that was removed during the editing process for length.
Given my state of exhaustion due to recent events, it it was hard not to think about the fragility of the human condition and how difficult human bodies are to keep functioning. So when my Canadian houseguest Alexandra Staseson grabbed a borrowed guitar, and played a friend and I some songs she had written after being in a harrowing pedestrian car accident in NYC at the age of 19, I was so moved that I contacted a friend with a radio show about people with disabilities on the Austin community radio station. The next day, Staseson was on “The Common Thread” as the on -air house band for the show on KOOP radio. She was telling the story about songs she wrote while stuck in a hospital bed, envying the freedom of a fly on the window. I couldn’t help thinking of my father being in the ICU when I was listening to “Rains on Me.”
Sometimes the shadow that a fly makes, on a sunny day’s brick wall, is louder, Than any song I could sing at all…And Amazing Grace I lift my face To the sky Whenever I hear that sound I try to run I try to fly I wonder why I’m still stuck on the ground. And then it goes and rains on me. And then it goes and rains on me. But Lord I see You’re just trying to wash me clean When it rains on me